This new analysis, which examines the political campaign contributions from those most active in education reform, finds that the movement is populated by individuals who support Democratic candidates for public office. The bottom line: The leading participants in the school-reform "wars" are mostly engaged in an intramural brawl, one…

Using the frameworks of critical discourse analysis, representation theory, and legitimization theory, this study examines the political discourse of the campaign for Proposition 227 in California--particularly, the key social representations of languages, their speakers, and the main political actors in the campaign. The analysis examines the…

Following a period of close to a century when the Irish language was placed at the margins of the education system under British rule, there was a radical change in curriculum provision following political independence in Ireland in the 1920s. The importance of the Irish language in defining sovereignty, national identity, and nationhood in the…

Early advocates for the expansion of women's higher education imagined a future that was deeply embedded in their aspirations for social, economic and political equality. In the vanguard of campaigns for wider access to higher education were women professors, they themselves outsiders within an academic hierarchy marked by male privilege. This…

For nearly 40 years, according to this author, "follow the money" has been an axiom in both journalism and politics--although, as Shakespeare might complain, one "more honour'd in the breach than the observance." It is useful to resurrect the axiom in analyzing the multimedia buzz and policy debates swirling around the movie "Waiting for…

From the Cold War to the neoliberal era, state-sanctioned education reforms have been less concerned with responsible citizenship or social justice than matters of national security and economic supremacy. Meanwhile, the United States struggles to climb international education rankings or even close its own national achievement gap. While it…

Purpose: Teachers' resistance to educational reform has been explored, with special attention given to the reasons driving opposition and the resistance practices employed inside school walls. These studies have not, however, examined the agenda setting strategy employed by teachers opposing new policy on the national level, nor has any extensive…

The "Victorian Free Library Service Board Act" of 1946 was the culmination of a long campaign to replace the mechanics' institute model of library provision with free libraries funded by state and local government. Given that library reform required legislation by the state government, this paper is mainly concerned with the political…

In 1969 after an intense political campaign, three Mexican Americans won seats on the board of trustees of the Cucamonga (California) School District--the Chicano Movement's first successful effort at community control of a school board. Political organizing strategies, community-initiated self-help projects, the new board's educational reforms,…

Amid the recent proliferation of teacher-led movements resisting high-stakes testing across the United States, the authors identify how a "failing" elementary school reclaimed local discourse by taking political action against top-down measures. Framed as competing modes of school reform, the authors offer the sociocultural framework of…

This paper explores relations between literacy education, ideology and politics, based on an analysis of educational reforms during Soviet and US military occupation in North and South Korea. Following the end of the Second World War, anti-illiteracy campaigns in the two Koreas became important means of political socialisation for Koreans amid the…

In the run-up to the U.S. 2022 midterm elections, Republicans brought their fight to regain control of Congress to school districts across the country. Deploying a national disinformation campaign regarding how issues of race and racism are taught in K-12 public schools, astroturf conservative advocacy organizations mobilized activists to descend…

This report represents one component of a project to examine how recently or whether enacted federal education reforms, put into place through the reauthorization of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (Improving America's Schools Act of 1994), are being implemented in high poverty schools. The first part of the report…

This article was based on the author's field study of the Iraqi Literacy campaign in late 1979 and on his follow-up work in 1981. The author spent several weeks interviewing campaign officials, administrators, teachers, and students throughout the country. The article presents the campaign's political philosophy, design, and strategies. (SSH)

Over the past decades, neo-Zionist discourse has gain prominence in Israel. This approach, which gives preference to the definition of Israel as a Jewish state over its definition as a democracy, is a specific version authoritarian populism. This paper explores how educational discourses, policies and curricular changes are being shaped by…